President Trump’s national emergency declaration violates the Constitution of the United States. The Supreme Court should declare it impermissible, and I believe it will.

The most important Supreme Court precedent is Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952), often called by its nickname, The Steel Seizure Case. The union representing steel workers staged a strike during the Korean War, threatening the supply of steel needed to produce military armaments.

President Harry Truman issued an executive order seizing the steel mills to keep them operating, so as not to imperil the war effort. The Supreme Court held that the President’s actions were unconstitutional.

“In the framework of our Constitution, the president’s power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a lawmaker,” wrote Justice Hugo Black in his opinion for the Court. “The Constitution limits his functions in the lawmaking process to the recommending of laws he thinks wise and the vetoing of laws he thinks bad.”

Justice Robert Jackson wrote a concurring opinion in Youngstown that has emerged over time as a sort of sacred constitutional scripture. In analyzing the legitimacy of assertions of presidential power, he reasoned, we may classify presidential actions as falling within three categories.

When the president acts pursuant to authority delegated to the president by Congress, the president’s authority is at its apex, for then the president exercises the full authority of the president’s own office under Article II of the Constitution, plus the full authority of Congress under Article I. If in defiance of Congress, the president’s power is at its lowest ebb.

When the president acts against a backdrop of congressional silence, the president’s actions are in a more ambiguous “twilight zone,” and we must determine whether the actions fall within the inherent powers of the executive.

To borrow from the great constitutional scholar Rocky Balboa in the movie Rocky, “It’s simple mathematics.”

Running the math, President Trump loses.

He has invoked his authority under the National Emergencies Act of 1976. Sounds good, but on closer review of the play, should be overruled.

This law was passed in the wake of President Nixon’s tenure to restrict the use of presidential power. It is inconceivable that in passing this law Congress intended to delegate to future presidents the power to implement projects unilaterally whenever frustrated by an inability to get congressional approval for them.

Any realistic appraisal of President Trump’s declaration will classify it as an act in defiance of Congress. He asked for the border wall funding, Congress said “no,” and he said “I call emergency.”

This didn’t work for Truman, and it shouldn’t work for Trump.

Imagine a president wants billions of dollars appropriated to build a new system of dams and locks along a major river, to revitalize shipping on the waterway and better control periodic flood problems. Congress, however, rejects the proposal, out of concerns that the project will harm the environment.

Nothing in the Constitution empowers the president to simply declare a “national emergency” and spend federal money to build the dams and locks, whether Congress likes it or not.

Let’s take it a few steps deeper. A constitutional principle known as the “non-delegation doctrine” bars Congress from delegating legislative authority to the president. Congress may delegate discretionary authority to the president, but it must provide some “intelligible principle” to guide that authority.

The Constitution does not permit Congress to simply say, “Here is a blank check to spend $20 billion as you see fit — just do what you think is good for the country.”

On the other hand, the Constitution allows broader grants of discretionary authority to the president in matters relating to foreign affairs and military matters than it allows for domestic legislation.

So how should the Supreme Court approach the border wall? Is it a foreign policy, or domestic policy?

In one sense it is a little bit of both — it is “on the border,” literally and figuratively. But the trumps here (pun intended) again go against this president.

To be sure, in Trump v. Hawaii, the Supreme Court upheld President Trump’s immigration ban. Critically, however, the Court found that Congress had clearly authorized the president to deny entry to any alien or class of aliens.

Congress, in sharp contrast, has not authorized a wall, nor appropriated the extra money that the president now seeks to divert for it. Under the Constitution, the building of a wall, on American soil, with American taxpayer money, requires an explicit appropriation from Congress.

There is a lot of glib speculation about how conservative Supreme Court justices, now commanding a majority on the Court, will approach these issues. My hope, and my belief, is that they will approach them conscientiously.

No Supreme Court justice, conservative or liberal, can conscientiously believe that the framers of the Constitution ever intended that American presidents, subject to the system of divided powers and checks and balances that the Framers so ingeniously devised, could get away with such a ruse as this president’s facile declaration of a “national emergency.”

I have faith that our present Supreme Court will throw off superficial political and ideological labels, as the Court did in United States v. Nixon, the Watergate tapes case, and Youngstown, the steel seizure case, and stand up for the rule of law. And not just any law — the Constitution, the law of the land.